Russell McOrmond's blog

A CBC Spark interview with James Grimmelmann about the ReDigi case in the USA highlights some of the confusion around the usage of the word "own" in the context of copyright. I understand why recipients of copyrighted works are confused given the confusing language used by the recipients of the government granted monopoly of copyright itself.

This is a discussion that has bothered me for a long time. There are debates and studies which try to suggest that one or another of "first to file" (FTF) or "first to invent" (FTI) is better for one or another type of inventor (small inventors, etc).

A recent article in IP Osgoode demonstrates the problem. In referencing a study the article suggests, "The study finds that the shift to FTF resulted in a reduction in the number of patents granted to individual Canadian inventors and small businesses". This is a study based on the Canadian experience having made the switch to FTF in 1989, with the USA switch coming into force in 2013.

The assumption of the article, and most of the debaters, is that if some patents are good, more are better. The fact that the number of patents granted went down after a change should not be presumed to be a bad thing, when in fact patents not being granted may just as easily be a good thing for innovation.

I received the following note about a contest from Patexia to find prior art on a specific patent. Given the critical problem of patent quality, where innovations that are low in utility, novelty and/or unobviousness are granted a patent statutory monopoly by governments, tools to invalidate poor quality patents are an important part of the solution.

This morning on the way into work I listened again to the interview CBC Spark's Nora Young did with Douglas Rushkoff as part of their Summer audio blog. I recommend everyone listen to this interview. Greatly simplifying, he speaks about how we live in a programmed world, and that people who don't understand at least a little bit about programming will not be able to be full participants.

Currently we are using the built-in Drupal commenting system on this site, which requires that people get a drupal account to comment. This seemed like the right thing to do when the site was set up, and we wanted everyone to have accounts so that they could also more easily send letters to their MPs.

I now wonder if the extra step to sign up, and the use of a simplistic editor forcing people to use HTML encoding, is no longer the right choice. From the comments I see on Twitter, Google plus and elsewhere talking about articles from this site, it isn't a lack of interest that has meant there isn't comments here. It is likely the commenting system.

The interesting thing about history is that different people who were there experienced it differently. The interesting thing about statistics is that the details of what the methodology is counting is often more important than the numbers that come out. Much of the Ars article this month and from 2005 were based on IDC numbers, which I have been critical of for years for being wildly inaccurate in reporting alternatives to Microsoft Windows running on Intel/AMD machines.

He didn't offer feedback on the focus of the article, which makes sense given Mr. Mincov provided a good tool to determining which of two different answers to the "why copyright" question we each might give. What I found interesting was his response to the second half which documented how it was the protection of the rights of technology owners that caused my increased interest in copyright law.

Andrei Mincov is a lawyer who specializes in copyright and related areas of law, and is actively involved in the copyright revision discussion. In April of this year he posted a Response to William Patry in the form of a review of William's book How to Fix Copyright. While I agree more with Mr. Patry's take on the issues than Mr. Mincov, I found reading the article and Mr. Patry's critique of this response extremely informative to solidify in my mind why I believe what I do.

Two forms of government manipulation of the marketplace have become the most controversial aspects of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) for Canadians: supply management and statutory knowledge monopolies. Each are government interventions in the marketplace between producers and consumers, each have a stated public policy purpose, and each are controversial.